A chatbot (sometimes referred to as a chatterbot) is programming that simulates the conversation or "chatter" of a human being through text or voice interactions. Chatbot virtual assistants are increasingly being used to handle simple, look-up tasks in both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) environments. The addition of chatbot assistants not only reduces overhead costs by making better use of support staff time, it also allows companies to provide a level of customer service during hours when live agents aren't available.
Previous generations of chatbots were present on company websites, e.g. Ask Jenn from Alaska Airlines which debuted in 2008[20] or Expedia's virtual customer service agent which launched in 2011.[20] [21] The newer generation of chatbots includes IBM Watson-powered "Rocky", introduced in February 2017 by the New York City-based e-commerce company Rare Carat to provide information to prospective diamond buyers.[22] [23]
Developed to assist Nigerian students preparing for their secondary school exam, the University Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), SimbiBot is a chatbot that uses past exam questions to help students prepare for a variety of subjects. It offers multiple choice quizzes to help students test their knowledge, shows them where they went wrong, and even offers tips and advice based on how well the student is progressing.
Foreseeing immense potential, businesses are starting to invest heavily in the burgeoning bot economy. A number of brands and publishers have already deployed bots on messaging and collaboration channels, including HP, 1-800-Flowers, and CNN. While the bot revolution is still in the early phase, many believe 2016 will be the year these conversational interactions take off.
Note — If the plan is to build the sample conversations from the scratch, then one recommended way is to use an approach called interactive learning. We will not go into the details of the interactive learning here, but to put it in simple terms and as the name suggests, it is a user interface application that will prompt the user to input the user request and then the dialogue manager model will come up with its top choices for predicting the best next_action, prompting the user again to confirm on its priority of learned choices. The model uses this feedback to refine its predictions for next time (This is like a reinforcement learning technique wherein the model is rewarded for its correct predictions).

Most chatbots try to mimic human interactions, which can frustrate users when a misunderstanding arises. Watson Assistant is more. It knows when to search for an answer from a knowledge base, when to ask for clarity, and when to direct you to a human. Watson Assistant can run on any cloud – allowing businesses to bring AI to their data and apps wherever they are.

Search for the bot you want to add. At the time of this writing, there are about a dozen bots available, with more being added every day. Chat bots are available for customer service, news, ordering, and more, depending on the company that releases it. For example, you could get news from the CNN bot and order flowers from the 1-800-flowers bot. The process for finding a bot varies depending on your device:[1]

Through Amazon’s developer platform for the Echo (called Alexa Skills), developers can develop “skills” for Alexa which enable her to carry out new types of tasks. Examples of skills include playing music from your Spotify library, adding events to your Google Calendar, or querying your credit card balance with Capital One — you can even ask Alexa to “open Dominoes and place my Easy Order” and have pizza delivered without even picking up your smartphone. Now that’s conversational commerce in action.

Reports of political interferences in recent elections, including the 2016 US and 2017 UK general elections,[3] have set the notion of botting being more prevalent because of the ethics that is challenged between the bot’s design and the bot’s designer. According to Emilio Ferrara, a computer scientist from the University of Southern California reporting on Communications of the ACM,[4] the lack of resources available to implement fact-checking and information verification results in the large volumes of false reports and claims made on these bots in social media platforms. In the case of Twitter, most of these bots are programmed with searching filter capabilities that target key words and phrases that reflect in favor and against political agendas and retweet them. While the attention of bots is programmed to spread unverified information throughout the social media platform,[5] it is a challenge that programmers face in the wake of a hostile political climate. Binary functions are designated to the programs and using an Application Program interface embedded in the social media website executes the functions tasked. The Bot Effect is what Ferrera reports as when the socialization of bots and human users creates a vulnerability to the leaking of personal information and polarizing influences outside the ethics of the bot’s code. According to Guillory Kramer in his study, he observes the behavior of emotionally volatile users and the impact the bots have on the users, altering the perception of reality.
The advancement in technology has opened gates for the innovative and efficient solutions to cater the needs of students by developing applications that can serve as a personalized learning resource. Moreover, these automated applications can potentially help instructors and teachers in saving up a lot of time by offering individual attention to each student.
When one dialog invokes another, the Bot Builder adds the new dialog to the top of the dialog stack. The dialog that is on top of the stack is in control of the conversation. Every new message sent by the user will be subject to processing by that dialog until it either closes or redirects to another dialog. When a dialog closes, it's removed from the stack, and the previous dialog in the stack assumes control of the conversation.
Evie's capacities go beyond mere verbal or textual interactions; the AI utilised in Evie also extends to controlling the timing and degree of facial expressions and movement. Her visually displayed reactions and emotions blend and vary in surprisingly complex ways, and a range of voices are delivered to your browser, along with lip synching information, to bring the avatar to life! Evie uses Flash if your browser supports it, but still works even without, thanks to our own Existor Avatar Player technology, allowing you to enjoy her to the full on iOS and Android.

Two trends — the exploding popularity of mobile messaging apps and advances in artificial intelligence — are coinciding to enable a new generation of tools that enable brands to communicate with customers in powerful new ways at reduced cost. Retailers and technology firms are experimenting with chatbots, powered by a combination of machine learning, natural language processing, and live operators, to provide customer service, sales support, and other commerce-related functions.

ELIZA's key method of operation (copied by chatbot designers ever since) involves the recognition of clue words or phrases in the input, and the output of corresponding pre-prepared or pre-programmed responses that can move the conversation forward in an apparently meaningful way (e.g. by responding to any input that contains the word 'MOTHER' with 'TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY').[9] Thus an illusion of understanding is generated, even though the processing involved has been merely superficial. ELIZA showed that such an illusion is surprisingly easy to generate, because human judges are so ready to give the benefit of the doubt when conversational responses are capable of being interpreted as "intelligent".